A meteor is in the sky , a meteorite has already landed on the the surface, an asteroid is bigger than 1km in diameter. A shooting star is essentially a a meteor breaking up in the atmosphere.

This interesting website from the ever excellent Boston Globe has a great range of technologies that we humans could employ to divert a potentially catastrophic meteor impact event.

Remember that one theory states that the dinosaurs were probably wiped out by the impact of an asteroid in the Caribbean just of the coast of Mexico. The Chicxulub crater off the Yucatan peninsula is the supposed location of the impact site. Recent debate seems to question this theory however as reported here.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that we we sent people to the moon 40 years ago with technology that had less processing power than the average modern calculator. Why has space travel stagnated? Possibly because we’ve got enough problems and money that needs to be spent on sorting out the issues on Planet Earth.

The image of Earth rise is apparently the most famous picture in history although I prefer the image that the Voyager 1 Spacecraft took called Pale Blue Dot to give an idea of how small we are in the universe. I’ve alos found this page which has a great compilation of Images of Earth from Planetary Spacecraft from the Planetary Society.

The website We Choose the Moon is a brilliant website celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing.